From Kathleen Shearer, Executive Director, Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR)
Göttingen, Germany COAR is pleased to announce the publication of the initial outcomes of the COAR Next Generation Repositories Working Group for public comment.
In April 2016, the Confederation of Open Access Repositories (COAR) launched a working group to help identify new functionalities and technologies for repositories and develop a road map for their adoption. For the past several months, the group has been working to define a vision for repositories and sketch out the priority user stories and scenarios that will help guide the development of new functionalities.
The vision is to position repositories as the foundation for a distributed, globally networked infrastructure for scholarly communication, on top of which layers of value added services will be deployed, thereby transforming the system, making it more research-centric, open to and supportive of innovation, while also collectively managed by the scholarly community.
Underlying this vision is the idea that a distributed network of repositories can and should be a powerful tool to promote the transformation of the scholarly communication ecosystem. In this context, repositories will provide access to published articles as well as a broad range of artifacts beyond traditional publications such as datasets, pre-prints, working papers, images, software, and so on.
The working group presents 12 user stories that outline priority functionalities for repositories. The document, to which you can provide public comments directly, is available here: nextgenrepo.coar-repositories.org
We very much welcome your input, and also encourage you to share this message with your colleagues. We hope to have widespread feedback from the community.
Public comments are open from February 7 – March 3, 2017.